Photograph printing kiosks (“photo kiosks”) are self-service stations, often installed in shopping malls, drugstores, and grocery stores, that allow a customer to obtain high-quality prints of their photographs. Modern photo kiosks include memory-card slots for reading media that many popular digital cameras used to store the images their users take. The kiosk prints images stored on the memory card.
Image nesting is a popular and cost-saving feature on many photo kiosks. Image nesting involves printing multiple images on a page, and is often used for making calendars and photo albums. While users are often given the option of arranging the photos themselves, it is important that they be able to achieve desirable results with minimal effort. To this end, many photo kiosks provide for automatically arranging the photographs, e.g., in chronological or some arbitrary order.
Users typically want their printouts as soon as possible without sacrificing print quality. However, all printers have limitations on print speed. In particular, the inkjet printers typically incorporated in photo kiosks print in transverse swaths across longitudinally advancing media. A printhead or a group of print heads (used to direct ink onto the media) may have to make several passes at each media advance position to ensure high print quality. All these passes consume time while a user waits for the image.
Many inkjet printers provide for plural print modes, including a slow print mode which can provide quality prints for all types of images and one or more faster print modes that can provide quality prints for at least some types of images. While it is generally undesirable to require a kiosk user to select print modes, it is possible for a kiosk to analyze an image and select a print mode automatically depending on the analysis outcome as taught in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/090,819, filed Apr. 18, 2008 (which patent application claims priority to PCT application PCT/EP2005/055429, filed Oct. 20, 2005 and published as 2007045277 on Apr. 26, 2007). Using this automated print-mode selection allows a user to receive a high-quality print using the fastest print mode that can yield a high quality print of the given image.
This reference does not address nested images explicitly; however, it can be inferred that in the case of nested images, the print mode for a page would be selected to match the slowest print mode associated with any of the nested images. Thus, for a page with nine images, if any of the nine require the slowest print mode, all nine images would be printed using the slowest print mode. What is needed is a way to reduce the time required to generate high-quality prints of nested images.
Herein, related art is described to facilitate understanding of the invention. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art. Of course, the prior art status of references can often be determined from their publication, filing, and issuance dates, notwithstanding any lack of explicit admission.